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24-hour trading volume for Bitcoin is $4.86 billion (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin). Most active NYSE s

by sowbug 9y ago

24-hour trading volume for Bitcoin is $4.86 billion (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bitcoin). Most active NYSE stock last Friday was Bank of America, trading about $3.1 billion (http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-activnyse-actives.html http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-activnyse-actives....). I don't understand why you'd compare a single security's trading volume to an entire stock exchange's volume. It is not a meaningful comparison.

dredmorbius 9y ago
If you wanted a fair comparison, we wouldn't be comparing exchanges at all, but total financial transactions. That is if we're going to treat Bitcoin as a currency and not some sort of asset transfer vehicle. Visa International handles 300 million transactions/day, and $3 trillion/year. Or you could look at total US GDP or GWP (gross world product), which are in very rough numbers, $17 trillion and $70 trillion respectively. Bitcoin at a $5 billion daily trade is 1/8 the US financial transactions market, and roughly 1/40th that of total global trade. Honestly, that's higher than I'd have expected, but it's also in vastly greater trade blocks than most daily purchases.
- sowbug 9y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking the same thing after leaving the prior comment. There is exchange-to-other-currency volume (largely BTC as store of value), and then there is exchange-as-money volume (BTC as currency). In theory you subtract the former from the total transaction volume ($4.6B over last 24 hours according to https://blockchain.info/stats https://blockchain.info/stats). Unfortunately that gives me a negative number ($4.6B - $5.4B = negative), which at first suggests the methodology is wrong, but then I remember that not all currency-exchange transactions happen on-chain. Send BTC to GDAX, then buy/sell/buy/sell/buy/sell, then receive $$$... all that could be as little as a single blockchain transaction. I'm sure someone has tried to determine how much of BTC traffic is closed-loop within the BTC ecosystem. I doubt it's much. Anyway, I'm ratholing.

by sowbug 9y ago

dredmorbius 9y ago

If you wanted a fair comparison, we wouldn't be comparing exchanges at all, but total financial transactions. That is if we're going to treat Bitcoin as a currency and not some sort of asset transfer vehicle. Visa International handles 300 million transactions/day, and $3 trillion/year. Or you could look at total US GDP or GWP (gross world product), which are in very rough numbers, $17 trillion and $70 trillion respectively. Bitcoin at a $5 billion daily trade is 1/8 the US financial transactions market, and roughly 1/40th that of total global trade. Honestly, that's higher than I'd have expected, but it's also in vastly greater trade blocks than most daily purchases.

sowbug 9y ago
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing after leaving the prior comment. There is exchange-to-other-currency volume (largely BTC as store of value), and then there is exchange-as-money volume (BTC as currency). In theory you subtract the former from the total transaction volume ($4.6B over last 24 hours according to https://blockchain.info/stats https://blockchain.info/stats). Unfortunately that gives me a negative number ($4.6B - $5.4B = negative), which at first suggests the methodology is wrong, but then I remember that not all currency-exchange transactions happen on-chain. Send BTC to GDAX, then buy/sell/buy/sell/buy/sell, then receive $$$... all that could be as little as a single blockchain transaction. I'm sure someone has tried to determine how much of BTC traffic is closed-loop within the BTC ecosystem. I doubt it's much. Anyway, I'm ratholing.